Fox's Carl Cameron Plays Romney Surrogate On Welfare Reform

Mitt Romney's campaign released today a new advertisement[1] attacking President Obama for "quietly announcing a plan to gut welfare reform," referring to a Department of Health and Human Services rule change that grants states more flexibility in granting waivers to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Family (TANF) program's work requirements. A number of media outlets[2] have pointed out[3] a fatal flaw[4] in Romney's attack: that in 2005, then-Massachusetts governor Romney joined several other Republican governors in endorsing similar TANF waivers[5]. But for Carl Cameron, the facts undermining the ad took a back seat to repeating -- indeed, embellishing -- the Romney campaign message.

Reporting on the ad this morning on America's Newsroom, Cameron called the ad a "renewed attack" on Obama as "an extreme liberal," and said the Romney campaign views the TANF rule change as "just big-government liberalism putting more and more government dependency into the economic bloodstream."

Cameron's language echoed the Romney campaign's press release[6] on the ad, which describes the president as a "devoted believer in old-school, big-government liberalism" who wants "a culture of dependency."